Well, calling it both "first-person" or "third-person" perspective are really misnomers. It's a direct conscious presence and experience here and now without a reference point of any particular "perspective". And all of it is real - all individual qualities and preferences, the sense of self (whether or not anything is still left of it), all the flow of sensory phenomena, ideas, imaginations. They all appear in the limitless space of ATW, not randomly as bubbles, but as a result of the active agency of ATW. They all exist, but not in a way we usually think in our dualistic mode of perception as if they represent separate subjects and objects, but in a different way - as a flow of forms of AWT inseparable from AWT. And in the latter sense everything exists and real - me and you and everyone else and the rest of the universe. But when seen in this "direct presence" way, the individual barriers and limitations imposed by dualistic perception and thinking will inevitably fall away and the innate qualities of AWT (such as love, wisdom, compassion) will manifest naturally.Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 9:58 pm OK, Eugene, you like to call the reality of Being "stream of ATW" - fine. If you feel more secure speaking of your first-person existence in third-person - that's OK. But when this is taken as an ideal, it is not without repercussions. When you get used to this mode of cognition, everything that defines and constrains your individual stream will be sought in such a third-person way. For example, there's no denying that you have temperament, character, and so on. After all, you have certain preferences. You prefer guitar over some other instrument. You prefer some spiritual traditions over others and so on. Even if you consider yourself ego-less, something still manifests these personalized preferences. You certainly realize that this cannot be some innate quality of pure consciousness. It's only some limited manifestation of the limitless potential of existence. There's something that makes some things more sympathetic to Eugene and others less so. As an engineer, you may say that there's something in the World state that 'stores' this fact. I believe you could say that this is a feature of the riverbed of the ATW stream. But with your approach, the only way you can expect to know something of these constraints is by seeing them as third-person objects, as some phenomena within your 'pure consciousness'. This is already problematic because you very well know that no image in your consciousness can be considered to be the real thing. This opens the question: if you somehow see an image of the riverbed of your character, temperament, interests, preferences, etc. and this image cannot be the reality, then what is the reality of this riverbed and how can it be known in its true nature?
There is a famous saying by Dogen (the founder of Japanese Zen Buddhism):
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
― Dōgen